Month: December 2011

Original Author: Don Olmstead There is nothing that can break a programmer’s concentration quite like a long compile time. As a project grows a simple change can go from a second wait, to a trip to the coffee pot; A complete rebuild becomes something that is only reasonable to do on the way out the … Continue reading “#include”

Original Author: Bruce Dawson It seemed wrong to do a ‘normal’ blog post on December 23rd, and my programming themed “Night Before Christmas” rap medley never quite came together, so instead I’m doing a top-ten list. Well, not really a “top-ten” list, but a list of ten indispensable programming technologies I’ve used this year. I’ve … Continue reading “Top Ten Technologies of 2011”

Original Author: John-Carmack The most important thing I have done as a programmer in recent years is to aggressively pursue static code analysis. Even more valuable than the hundreds of serious bugs I have prevented with it is the change in mindset about the way I view software reliability and code quality. It is important … Continue reading “Static Code Analysis”

Original Author: Kevin Gadd A lot of people have been talking about a bill called the Entertainment Software Association, or ESA. The ESA is a lobbying association that acts on behalf of game developers, game publishers, and other industry groups, and you may be familiar with the convention they organize – E3. I won’t tell … Continue reading “SOPA and the Entertainment Software Association”

Original Author: Don Olmstead There is nothing that can break a programmer’s concentration quite like a long compile time. As a project grows a simple change can go from a second wait, to a trip to the coffee pot; A complete rebuild becomes something that is only reasonable to do on the way out the … Continue reading “#include”

Original Author: Pete Collier Compulsion loops in the short, medium and long-term, if visualised, would resemble helm chain Introduction: Compulsion loop is a very fancy term isn’t it? It’s a recently coined term, perhaps a couple of years old, I’m unsure of its exact origin. However, there is no official definition of it, so as … Continue reading “Compulsion Loops in the Short, Medium and Long-term”

Original Author: Alex Darby Welcome to the 4th part of my C/C++ Low Level Curriculum – more Stack! The last post was a mammoth and took me ages so this post is going to be significantly shorter, and will consequently cover less ground. Specifically we’re going to look at how more than one parameter is … Continue reading “C / C++ Low Level Curriculum Part 4: More Stack”

Original Author: Andy Thomason Beyond intrinsics to code idiom Andy Thomason 4:51 pm on December 24, 2011 Counting comments… A brief history of SIMD I first encountered SIMD architectures back in the early 1990′s when I was writing MPEG and JPEG codecs for a variety of CPUs. I was asked by a couple of chip … Continue reading “Beyond intrinsics to code idiom”

Original Author: Michael A. Carr-Robb-John Building systems that allow A.I. characters to move intelligently around an environment is a common challenge encountered by game play programmers. One of the main data requirements needed to do this is a level map of some kind, it might be a grid of squares or more common these days … Continue reading “Walking in the Void”

Original Author: Niklas Frykholm I recently added a new feature to the BitSquid tool chain – support for source and destination platforms in the data compiler. What it means is that you can take the data for one platform (the source) and compile it to run on a different platform (the destination). So you can … Continue reading “Platform Specific Resources”